Computer software applications often display information to a user in the form of a table or list on an electronic display. These tables may contain one or more columns of information with rows potentially containing data exceeding the width of the electronic display. In order to facilitate the display of such information, the horizontal scrolling of columns on the visible area of the display are often employed.
A common situation encountered when displaying data in a column on an electronic display is that the data in a row of the column (i.e., the data string) is often longer than the width of the column display (the portion of the column being displayed). For this reason, a horizontal scrolling mechanism is often provided to allow the rows (data strings) in the column to be scrolled so that all the contents of the data strings may be viewed and accessed.
Another situation that may be encountered involves a table or list that is wider than the visible portion of the electronic display. In this situation, all or part of the column display may not be visible. Therefore, horizontal scrolling of the columns in the table or list may also be involved.
FIG. 1 is a diagram depicting an example of a list or table that may be presented on an electronic display. The table 100 is organized in columns 110, 120, 130, 140, 150, 155, 160, 165, 170, 175 each with a column header 105 and containing rows of data 190. The intersection of a row and a column defines a data cell, the data cell containing the data from the row pertaining to the column. Each data cell may contain a string of information, hereinafter data string. For example, the data cell 192 for the third row 191 and the “Document States” column 140 (the fourth column from the left side) contains a data string with the value “synchronizing”. Data strings may contain various types of information. In another example, the data cells of the “Document ID” column 110 contain data strings with path names as values.
One particular problem that may exist under certain circumstances is the inability to distinguish between the data strings based on the information in the column display. This situation may occur when the data strings are longer than the width of the column display. For example in FIG. 1, the data strings in the data cells of the “Document ID” column 110 are longer than the width of the column display. In FIG. 1, the visible portion of the data strings (i.e., the portions in the column display) of the “Document ID” column 110 are all identical. The information displayed does not allow a user to distinguish between the data strings.
FIG. 2 is diagram illustrating the distinguishable and non-distinguishable areas of two sample data strings based on the data string values shown in the data cells of the “Document ID” column 110 of FIG. 1. In FIG. 2, both the first data string 210 and the second data string 220 have a data string length “N” of 54 characters 230. The two data strings 210, 220 may be viewed as having two separate sections in relation to each other—a non-distinguishable or similar section 270 and a distinguishable or non-similar section 280. The non-distinguishable section 270 of each data string 210, 220 exists because the values for each data string position are similar to each other. The non-distinguishable section 270 covers the first 41 character positions 250 of each of the data strings 210, 220 in the example shown in FIG. 2. At position 42 260, the values for each data string 210, 220 are no longer similar (i.e., they have become distinguishable). In this example, the first data string 210 has a value of “6” at position 42 260 while the second data string 220 has a value of “7” at position 42 260. Starting at position 42 260, the remainder of each data string 210, 220 (positions 42 260 to N 230, which in this case is 54) become the distinguishable section 280 of each data string 210, 220. The potential problem inherent with the non-distinguishable sections of data strings is shown in FIG. 1.
In FIG. 1, only the initial portion of the path names are displayed and a user cannot discern which path name a data cell refers without manually scrolling the data to a distinguishable portion of the path name. Only 21 characters of the data strings are displayed in the “Document ID” column display 110. Using the sample strings 210, 220 of FIG. 2, the data strings would have be horizontally scrolled 21 more characters before a user could start to distinguish between the data strings 210, 220. Though FIGS. 1 and 2 use path names as examples, this situation may also apply to many other types of information contained in the data cells of a column.